The WebGuild Web 2.0 Conference & Expo was a great success! The Conference was on Wednesday and had about 1,000 registered attendees. Thank you very much to everyone who contributed to making it a success – thank you to the Keynotes Craig Newmark, Founder of Craigslist and Gil Penchina, CEO of Wikia, all the very knowledgeable and insightful speakers, sponsors, exhibitors, and attendees. The feedback we’ve received has been fantastic. Photos and videos will be posted shortly.

The day started off with introductory remarks from Daya Baran, President of WebGuild, who noted that Web 2.0 is representative of many things including free or almost free, open, accessible, community, social, collaboration, sharing, and innovation and that these are the elements we’ve strived to stay true to in bringing you this Conference and that the Conference is about knowledge sharing and community.

Opening Keynote, Gil Penchina, CEO of Wikia was fantastic. He talked about Wikia’s wiki communities including the most famous of them all, Wikipedia, and about the newly launched Wikia Search, a community-driven search engine. Craig Newmark, Founder of Craigslist was a knockout and his session was very informative and entertaining. He was very candid about Craigslist’s rise, the site’s very un-Web 2.0 design, his view on advertising, eBay’s stake, and his role as Customer Service Rep.

Many of the breakout sessions such as Designing For Users, Usability 2.0, Designing the Mobile Web, Web Marketing, Web Dev, and others were standing room only. The User Revolution session where we turned the tables and interviewed actual users and members of the Web 2.0 generation in person was very insightful and interesting.

Winners of the Web 2.0 Website Awards were as follows: Craigslist for Best Online Community Website, Best Web 2.0 Apps went to Zoho, Best Emerging Social Networking Site went to Socializr, and BarackObama.com for Best Politicking Website (Barack was not available to accept in person but a rep from his campaign did).